THE SOLO TRAVELLER
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The Changing Map
The first stop on David’s travels was Estonia where he cared for huskies as a volunteer. Image courtesy David Bossek.
A world without shortcuts
A Q&A with David Bossek
Briefly …
Dr David Bossek’s ONE PLANET Expedition has become an exploration of distance, environmental responsibility and what happens in the space between destinations.
There are easier ways to travel around the world. David Bossek has deliberately chosen not to take them, setting out in 2024 on the ONE PLANET Expedition, a journey around the world expected to take four years and completed almost entirely overland and by sea. More than 65,000 kilometres later, he has reached Australia and is preparing for the long journey back towards Germany, where he plans to arrive in 2028.
The expedition brings together two parts of David’s life that might otherwise sit uneasily alongside one another: a desire to explore the world and a scientific career spent examining the environmental impacts of human consumption. Rather than separating one from the other, he has made that tension part of the journey itself.
The Solo Traveller caught up with David as he prepares to leave Australia and continue west, to talk about what nearly three years on the road have taught him, what has challenged him, and what he hopes to discover on the long journey still ahead.
A serious cycling accident left you unable to walk for months, and you have said it prompted you to turn your life upside down. What changed for you during those months, and how did that experience eventually lead to the ONE PLANET Expedition?
When you suddenly cannot move and are forced to slow down, all you really have is time to think. Lying there, knowing that the accident could have ended fatally, I kept returning to the same question: what is a life for, if not for the things you actually dream about? And what is my purpose in this world?
What I had always wanted to do was travel once around the world in search of a particular kind of freedom: waking up with nothing ahead of me except the journey itself. Not being tied to one place, but moving through the world and exploring – places, people, and myself – at my own rhythm.
My PhD is in Life Cycle Assessment and focuses on measuring the environmental impacts of human consumption. I could not honestly set off to travel once around the world, fly from one destination to the next, and pretend I had not thought about the environmental consequences. So the dream raised a different set of questions: “What is my actual environmental footprint while travelling?”, “How can I reduce it if I do not know how large it is?”, and “What would it genuinely mean to take responsibility for the impact that remains?”
Those questions combined turned my healing process into a phase of planning the ONE PLANET Expedition, a four-year, once-around-the-world journey overland and by sea, scientifically collecting data as I go to measure its environmental footprint, reducing my footprint wherever possible, and creating a positive impact beyond filmmaking through my projects ‘Run4Planet’ (a global charity running initiative supporting environmental initiatives and animal welfare) and ‘Mindful Mountain Adventures’ (group hikes reconnecting people with themselves and nature).
The accident did not give me the idea. That had already been there for years. It gave me the rare gift of hitting pause on life long enough to think about what truly mattered and the willingness to finally act on it.
(Left) David working as an animal rescue volunteer in Tenerife; and volunteering as a videographer at Zendara Farm, in the company of their Nigerian Dwarf goats, Byron Bay, New South Wales, Australia. Images courtesy David Bossek.
You left your career as an environmental scientist and effectively turned the world into your laboratory. After 65,000 kilometres, how has travelling this way changed any of the assumptions you held as a scientist about travel and its environmental cost?
The greatest change in my thinking is this: compensation should not be something that happens only after the journey, once the final footprint has been turned into a number. Formal compensation can only be determined after I have measured and reduced what I can, but taking responsibility should begin at the same time as the journey itself.
In every place I pass through, I ask whether I can leave it a little better than I found it. That can mean giving my time and skills to environmental initiatives, actively participating in their work, or using my platform to document and highlight what they are doing. I would not automatically count those actions as formal offsets; their effects would need to be measurable and attributable. But they are part of taking responsibility in real time instead of waiting until the end of the expedition to make a payment.
I still plan to make a monetary contribution based on the footprint that remains and to find a plot of land where I can help restore an ecosystem over the long term. But neither money nor restoration makes the original impact disappear or buys permission to create more. For me, the honest process happens simultaneously: measure and reduce as I travel, contribute wherever I can along the way, and then address what remains as transparently as possible.
That shift has also changed what a footprint means to me. I stopped treating it as nothing more than a number at the end of a calculation and began seeing it as the accumulated result of hundreds of daily decisions, and as part of the wider impact I leave behind – not only on the environment but also in the lives of the people and communities I encounter. It is no longer just something I calculate; it is something I can see and feel. In research, you work with averages and system boundaries, so much of it remains abstract. A flight from Frankfurt to Sydney is a figure in a spreadsheet. Living inside your own assessment for almost three years is very different because you have to make every decision yourself, every day, often while tired, hungry, under time pressure, or with very few options.
Several of my assumptions did not survive contact with reality. I had assumed that transport would be almost the whole story. It still matters, of course, but in the picture emerging from my journey, once flying is removed, it no longer automatically dominates. Food and accommodation become much more visible. Food is rarely the headline in ‘sustainable travel’ discussions, yet it is a choice you make several times every day. I had also expected accommodation to be relatively straightforward to assess. It is not. Sleeping in a hotel room, a hostel, someone’s spare room, a volunteer placement, a tent, or on a sailboat cannot honestly be treated as the same kind of night. The important question is not only where I slept, but how much additional energy, water, and infrastructure my presence required and how that impact should be allocated.
Equipment added another layer. Camping may require very little energy during the night, but the tent, sleeping bag, stove, camera and bicycle still had to be produced. Much of their footprint already exists before I use them for the first time. That is why keeping equipment for longer, repairing it whenever possible, and buying second-hand have become important parts of how I travel. In most photos I will have the same T-shirt and pants on. A new product marketed as “sustainable” is not automatically better than the one already in my back-pack. If anything, measuring my journey has made me less self-satisfied rather than more. The number is never as good as you hope, and it is not the end of the work. It only matters if it changes what you do.
You have travelled largely overland and by sea. What has moving through the world this way taught you about distance? Has it changed your understanding of the journey itself?
Flying deletes distance. You sit down, you watch a film, you stand up somewhere else. The space in between simply does not exist for you, and neither do the people who live in it. Overland, distance is not a number. It is a lot of time, weather, terrain and people to interact and connect with. Crossing the Salar de Uyuni alone by bicycle taught me what several hundred kilometres cost when you have altitude sickness, diarrhoea and no cycling shorts. Three weeks on a twelve-metre steel sailboat crossing the Atlantic taught me what it means for the horizon not to change for weeks at a time and how much larger the ocean is than any map can possibly suggest.
Crossing the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, the world’s largest salt flat. Image courtesy David Bossek.
The other thing that changes is that you cannot cross a country alone. Hitchhiking means you traverse a place in the passenger seats of strangers, on their terms and at their speed. Twenty-five thousand kilometres from Antarctica to Alaska was not really my achievement. It was several hundred people’s kindness, arranged end to end. The ONE PLANET Expedition is not a solo expedition; without the thousand kind souls along the way, it would not have been possible.
And the destination begins to shrink in importance. When the space in between is where everything really happens – the people you meet, the things that go wrong, the moments you remember – arriving is no longer the point. I do not really see this as a journey with a fin-ish line anymore. It has become a way of moving through the world and exploring. The slower I move and the fewer expectations I carry, the freer I feel and the richer the experience becomes.
(Left) Sailing across the Atlantic Ocean; and David and the crew having survived a three-day storm while crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Images courtesy David Bossek.
You describe the expedition as an attempt to understand, reduce and account for the environmental cost of travel. Has there been a point during the journey when what you discovered forced you to change the way you were travelling?
Yes, but the biggest change did not come from replacing one product or mode of transport with another. It came from realising how often environmental choices are made possible, or impossible, by the system around you. As a scientist, I was used to comparing alternatives on paper. On the road, the bus either exists or it does not. A region either has a railway, or it has none.
I experienced this particularly clearly after reaching Alaska, when I needed to travel south to Panama to join a sailboat before the crossing season closed. The seasonal ferry I had planned to take was not running for the entire winter until spring. Its federal subsidy had been cut, and its onboard generator failed to meet emissions standards. The only overland route south passed through Canada, but I could not re-enter the country because Canadian border authorities had previously instructed me to leave and not return. To reach the sailboat in Panama in time, flying was therefore the only viable option. In only a few hours, the flight generated emissions equivalent to a good share of those I had tried to reduce during the entire preceding journey from Antarctica to Alaska.
Experiences like this have taught me that, in one place, the lower-impact option may also be the easiest. In another, avoiding a flight may mean waiting for days, hitchhiking, taking a long detour, or accepting that you cannot reach a place at all. Because I avoid flying wherever possible, I have learned to let the available infrastructure shape my route and timetable. I no longer assume that I should be able to reach every destination quickly or exactly when I planned.
Being robbed in Brazil showed me the same connection from a much harsher angle. For several weeks, I had almost no money. Paying for a bed, buying food, joining a tour, or making a new purchase simply stopped being an option. I hitchhiked, slept outside, dumpster-dived, asked bakeries and restaurants for leftover food at closing time, used what I already carried, and accepted help from people I met.
It was not a sustainability experiment, and I do not want to romanticise it. It was a consequence of having no means. My footprint did not disappear either; resources were still consumed, and some of those costs were shared by the people who helped me, but my direct consumption fell sharply. That made the connection between purchasing power and environmental impact very tangible. In most cases, having less money means consuming less and therefore having a smaller footprint. Price itself, however, is not a reliable measure of impact – a cheap flight can still produce far more emissions than a more expensive train journey. In my case, having almost no money meant buying almost nothing, travelling more slowly, and relying largely on what already existed.
What changed most was the question I began asking. It was no longer only, “Which available option has the lowest footprint?” It also became, “Why are these the only options?”, “What additional demand does my choice create?”, and “Am I willing to wait, change course, or go without?” Sometimes the greatest reduction does not come from choosing a greener version of the same journey or product. It comes from letting go of the assumption that every journey and product is necessary in the first place, that it has to be delivered fast, direct and comfortable, and that every need must be answered by buying something.
You are now beginning the long journey from Australia back to Germany, with your arrival planned for 2028. What are you most curious to discover during the journey still ahead?
Practically, I am most curious about whether I can continue the journey without flying, be-cause crossing oceans is always the bottleneck. I hope to crew on a boat from Australia to Indonesia, but the crossing still depends on weather, timing, and my visa situation. From there, reaching Europe overland will be genuinely difficult.
Before returning to Europe, I also want to cross into Africa, which means travelling through countries facing political instability. Many of these places are reduced to stereotypes, while international media coverage often focuses mainly on conflict and crisis. Yet once you arrive, the reality on the ground and the people you meet can be far more complex, and very different from the image you were given from afar. That uncertainty is also what excites me most.
Until now, English, fluent Spanish, and some French have carried me through most situations. Ahead are the Arab world, South Asia and South East Asia – cultures, languages, religions, and social norms that are far less familiar to me. For the first time, not understanding may become a central part of daily life. I am excited by that because it will force me to listen and observe more. And I know I will be drawn towards the slower, less-travelled routes that most visitors overlook.
Alongside measuring my own footprint, I am curious to understand how sustainability is viewed and practised in the different cultures and societies I travel through, even when it may not be described as “sustainability”. How present is it in everyday life, public debate, and political decision-making? I also want to see how the infrastructure I encounter – from public transport and energy systems to food supply and waste management – shapes what I can realistically reduce as a traveller. This connects to a much larger question: “How can rapidly changing societies improve living standards without repeating the carbon-intensive development path taken by many of today’s wealthier countries?”
“How can rapidly changing societies improve living standards without repeating the carbon-intensive development path taken by many of today’s wealthier countries?”
And then there is the part for which I am least prepared: arriving home. I am no longer the same person who set out. Four years is long enough for home to move on without you. I am curious whether I will be able to stop – whether, after so much movement, I can build a base somewhere and commit to long-term, place-based work in environmental protection and animal welfare. I suspect that may be harder than crossing the Darién Gap. Ask me again in 2028.